Merry Christmas and Happy New Year – 2009!

Fortumo‘s team wishes everyone to live a miraclous time among family and real friends.

Hi everyone. As today is the 24th of December it’s a perfect time for some Christmas stories from the business world. I will begin with many people’s favourite McDonald’s. I have already told you a story about McDonald’s SoCal and you can read it again if you want in order to compare the strategies.

The name of the campaign that I am telling you about is “Merry Xmas in The Restaurant”. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who are interested in running SMS services in China with Fortumo, then you will be quite interested in getting to know that telephone users in China are approaching the 1 billion mark and Internet users are nearing 300 million, as reported by the People’s Daily Online.

By the end of October, total number of telephone users in China reached 979 million, including 627 million mobile telephone subscribers and 352 million fixed-line users. The mobile phone business is continuing to replace the fixed-line business.
At present, data services including text messaging and broadband Internet access account for 33.4% of total revenue in the telecommunications industry.

Most of you know how important is to be able to act fast in case of big health emergencies. Attending a First Aid Course is of course a great thing, but in moments of panic, especially if it is a loved one that is in trouble, this knowledge can easily vanish.

This is one of the reasons why it came to attention how the use of SMSs could have quite interesting perspectives. There are already concrete examples. The Australian Red Cross provides a service where for a small fee, you can download instructions for CPR (=Cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to citizens’ mobile phone. The Australia Red Cross is aiming for the instructions to be on one in every five phones. At the time of writing this, there have been 5000 downloads.

And if you think this is a kind of case where just institutions can take part into, then you might remind how – some days ago – a British surgeon in the Congo made full of SMS to get instructed on how to remove a gangrenous collarbone and shoulder blade from a teenager. This perilous amputation is only done a handful of times each year in the UK, and the colleague doctor at home texted him the entire procedure and signed off with a cheery, “Easy! Good luck.”

Well, after several delays, acts of God, and plain old human errors (yes, humans tend to do that sometimes), we’re thrilled to announce that as of today, everybody can finally create cool and profitable SMS services in Serbia!

Why Serbia?

You probably heard a lot about this country in western Balkans over the course of past several years (some of it is actually true!), but let’s redefine what we know:

• Serbia has a vibrant and fast growing internet market,
• Serbia has more mobile phones than people (11 phones per 10 people, and counting), so it’s a great place to offer SMS-services,
• Serbian people still have no fast and reliable way to monetize their web sites, or to pay for on-line services.

So, we really feel that adding Serbia to Fortumo’s ever growing family of countries was an logical next step (as you remember, we opened up in Romania and Bulgaria, which are just in the neighborhood a few months ago). And we’re sure that this market will go really well with our new super-easy SMS-pay service (it works in multiple countries at once too!).

Stay tuned for more updates!

Finally we can present you an advanced service which is at the same time really easy to set up. SMS-pay is the easiest way to charge your users by SMS for accessing password-protected section of your website or a restricted file. It comes with pre-written scripts and widgets that you can easily copy to your website to start earning revenue.

It works in all the markets Fortumo is presented and the most important is the multi-country service creation possibility, that enables you to create on service for all the countries you like.

If you have a website, check it out.

I have been reading quite a lot on mobile payment services around. In many countries,

Anyway – after I read about the latest mobile payment solution brought on the UK, I could notice how this business template has a notable interest of this own – and can give quite some inspiration to related services. So let’s have a more detailed view…

(1) Mobile payment services (MPS) aim to quickly and securely transfer cash from one place to another, all via text.

(2) This way – also affiliated merchants can also receive payments for their goods and services all via MPS.

(3) MPS services must entirely be geared towards customer satisfaction and have simplicity, convenience and ease of use all at the core of its offering. –> therefore it has to be (1) bank independent, (2) network independent, (3) handset independent, (4) age independent and (5) location independent, meaning users can use it anytime, anywhere and at any age.

Even more interesting is the use of simple commands to perform the requested transfer.

• To register -> password REGISTER YourName
• To link your credit card -> password LINK cardPassword (plus some additional instructions to register the card)
• To load the account with credit -> password GET CASH 5 cardPassword
• To check your balance -> password BALANCE
• To send money to a friend -> password BEEM FriendName 5.50

and so on, and so on..

If you have a basic experience in programming, and the necessary tools to operate with a Virtual POS, then you can create your own payment solution.

This post is just to point up a unusual trend that is becoming more and more popular in the states, especially those area that are mostly hit by the winter season. In this period of the year, many local radios’ websites provide updates on school closings via SMS. The phenomenum can be even more clear by having a look at this week’s top 50 in Google Trends.  For example, in the picture below, eleven out of the top  37, are radio call numbers and most of them are in areas with snowfall.

The top radio affiliate, WHUD, is 100.7 F.M. in Westchester New York, and offers text message alerts about school and government center closings after heavy snowfall. Although similar services are already up since years, snow alerts appeal to one of the most highly sought markets-the coveted age demographic of pre-teens and teens. Interesting

Using Fortumo can not only be a way to monetize traffic, but just a good system to simplify the practise of your favourite hobby. Let’s make an example on this post.

Let’s say you are leading a group that organises dancing events on Saturday nights.  And you would like to contact other members who love dancing. You can use a mailing list, write a post, inviting members to attend.  Then, you complain that not everybody reads your mail or pays attention all the time. So, some would miss out on the event.

Well, as event organiser you can inform “Registered and Interested” dancers via a sms system.  Here’s how I think it can be done.

1) YOu create a SMS-info service from Fortumo.com
2) You use a service for sending Bulk SMS, for example Clickatell Communicator

This way, handling your event is a matter of two steps

a- You write a post on the dance event, on your mail list. If needed, you can send an sms to inform the registered dance group.
b- All members who love to be informed of any dancing event can register their names with the Fortumo service. Those who do not register will NOT receive the SMS. You can easily collect the name of the registered user from the Fortumo service page

It’s not a automatic procedure, as it requires some manual operation and some good Office skills. But if your service becomes popular you can make a Premium service out of it. Why not?